A monster creeps through the scare zone during the opening night of Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios in 2010.

Alice Cooper opens for Rob Zombie at the Gibson Amphitheatre for the Gruesome Twosome Tour in September.

Rob Zombie performs at the Gibson Amphitheatre with Alice Cooper on the Gruesome Twosome tour in 2010.

John Murdy calls Rob Zombie's "House of 1000 Corpses" maze like a science project for him as he literally stumbled upon new and creative ways to make scary effects for the attraction, which guests at Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights experience wearing 3D glasses.

Hanging out around blood, guts, and corpses is all in a day's work for John Murdy, left, and Chris Williams whose job it is to scare the pants off of visitors to Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights.

John Murdy loves scaring folks with the scary attractions he designs at Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights every fall.

Chris Williams, production designer and art director at Universal Studios Hollywood for Halloween Horror Nights, poses with a victim in maze during last year's event.

John Murdy hangs out with a couple of Jason's tortured victims, which he helped to create, in the "Friday the 13th" maze at Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights.

Alice Cooper sings with a snake slithering around his neck during his first Los Angeles performance in 40 years at the Revolver Golden Gods Metal Music Awards at Club Nokia in April.

Rob Zombie, right, with band members, Piggy D, center, and John 5 pose for a photo on the black carpet at the Revolver Golden Gods Metal Music Awards at Club Nokia in April.

Rob Zombie performs at the Gibson Amphitheatre on the Gruesome Twosome tour with Alice Cooper in September.

William Beltran holds his friend Tania Salinas as they react by the scary clown as they walk through the scare zone during the opening night of Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios in 2010.

Shock rocker Alice Cooper will be featured in a new maze, "Alice Cooper: Welcome to My Nightmare," at Universal Studios Hollywood's Halloween Horror Nights which opens on Sept. 23.

When it comes to blood, guts and straight-up gore, nothing really fazes Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights creative director John Murdy. The 44-year-old Whittier resident has done and seen it all (mostly), he’s worked with the biggest names in the genre – Tobe Hooper, Rob Zombie, Eli Roth, just to name drop a few – but this haunting season is extra special for Murdy, as he was able to pair up on a maze with his all-time hero, original shock rocker Alice Cooper.

The attraction is loosely based on Cooper’s 1975 concept album “Welcome to My Nightmare” and coincides with the release of Alice’s latest dream-based record, “Welcome 2 My Nightmare,” which dropped on Sept. 13. Murdy says there are truly two events from his early childhood – that he can clearly pinpoint, anyway – that led him on his path of bloody debauchery. The first was when he was just 4 years old and his mother allowed him to watch “Frankenstein” and the second came when he was 6 and came across a series of eight-track tapes including “Love It to Death,” “Killer” and “Billion Dollar Babies,” all by Alice Cooper.

“I popped them into the player and immediately I was like ‘What is this?!,” Murdy recalls during a recent phone interview. “It combined two of my favorite passions – horror with rock ‘n’ roll. They’re very few people who you can truly call ‘original’ and Alice is in that rare pantheon and you can see how he has inspired so many others down the road.”

Murdy was a member of the Black Widow Alice Cooper fan club, he had a six-foot-tall poster of Alice Cooper in his bedroom, he would often write to Alice in the ‘70s, memorize the lyrics and he was sent home from junior high for wearing an Alice Cooper T-shirt to school. To say the very least, Murdy is jumping out of his own skin with excitement in taking on this project which debuts to the public during Halloween Horror Nights on Sept. 23.

TEACHER MEETS STUDENT

A few weeks ago, Murdy came face to face with his idol when Alice popped by Universal Studios Hollywood to check on the progress of the maze.

“I’m so not a fan boy,” Murdy says. “But for me, this is a dream come true. There’s no way I’d be doing what I’m doing today if it weren’t for Alice Cooper. When he left here that day, the last thing I said to him was ‘Thank you,’ because he had a hugely positive effect on my life. Here I am today, getting to do what I dreamed of doing when I was a kid building these things in my parents’ garage.”

So what exactly does the 63-year-old rocker, who has been busy out on tour and had only corresponded with Murdy via e-mails and phone chats, think about his first live-movie attraction?

“It looks really great,” Cooper says during a recent phone interview while out on the road. “He (Murdy) goes through ‘Along Came a Spider’ and he’s got something with ‘Cold Ethyl,’ which I can’t even explain what it is but I saw the pictures and it’s truly disgusting. Alice has always been synonymous with snakes and all kinds of ghoulies and things that go bump in the night, but he didn’t just go with the stereotypical thing. I don’t think he missed a thing. I don’t think there’s anything that I would have put in there that would be more graphic than what he’s already done. It’s a labor of love for him because he’s a big Alice fan and he’s done something that’s not just fun, but really scary.”

Murdy sifted through hundreds of Alice Cooper lyrics, picking out the best ones for inspiration for characters, environments and scenes for the mazes. He drew from tracks such as “Billion Dollar Babies,” “Sick Things” and “Steven.” Murdy admits that he was so excited about the maze, he could have gone in a million different directions, but thanks to his partner, production designer and art director Chris Williams, he was kept on task.

“Chris and I both give each other full veto power,” he says with a laugh. “I’d go down a certain path and he’d go ‘Not scary! Not scary!’ It was a great way of designing it. It does have to appeal to everyone, whether you’re a huge Alice fan or you just have a casual knowledge of his music.”

Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare” is just one of many attractions slated for this year’s event, which includes five scare zones and a total of six mazes. The famous Terror Tram has also been revamped and themed “Scream 4 Your Life,” based on Wes Craven’s latest “Scream” film.

Other maze themes include: “The Thing: Assimilation” which is based on the upcoming Universal prequel to the John Carpenter classic; “La Llorona: Villa de Almas Perdidas” as imagined by Mexico-based film star Diego Luna; “The Wolfman: The Curse of Talbot Hall.; and “Eli Roth’s Hostel: Hunting Season. After meeting with Murdy last year, Roth, a Halloween Horror Nights regular, finally has his own maze based on his gory “Hostel” films,” and “Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses: In 3-D ZombieVision” returns as well.

COOPER VS. ZOMBIE

Cooper cracked a joke that his maze is up against his longtime buddy Rob Zombie’s attraction. The two rockers are close – they toured together last year on the Gruesome Twosome Tour and Zombie inducted Alice Cooper into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March – and they have always been a bit competitive, Cooper says.

“At the same time we’re like brothers, he’s like my little brother,” Cooper says. “The great thing about him is that he totally gets the idea of rock ‘n’ roll, horror and comedy all rolled into one. You have to be very clever in how you do these things. You can’t play horror against horror. You have to play horror either against romance or comedy. In our case – it’s mostly very tongue-deeply-in-cheek comedy.”

While out on the road Cooper says that they’d often watch each other’s sets and if one of them brought out a new prop or tried something fresh and spectacular on stage, the other would try to outdo it.

“He’d watch my show and go ‘Oh brother’ and the next night he’d add something to his own show,” Cooper recalls. “Then I’d watch his show and say ‘Oh, OK, I’ll see that and raise you one giant Frankenstein.’ By the end of the tour, both of us had added and filled two giant trucks, but that’s what makes it fun. Very few people I play with really challenge me and when I get challenged, I pick it up. I think it made both of our shows better and really, Rob and I would do anything for each other.”

One would think that after years of doing everything horrific on stage – including lopping off his own head and hanging himself – that nothing would frighten the great Alice Cooper, except maybe creeping alone in his house at night.

“I sit at home on Wednesday nights and I have a great big house out in the desert in Arizona and I have a movie theater in there and I sit there watching ‘Ghost Hunters’ on Syfy,” he says. “My wife, she’s already asleep, and suddenly it’s midnight. It’s dark and I have to walk a quarter of a mile to my room and I’m going ‘What was that? I don’t know that noise.’ There’s something about being scared that we all actually enjoy. There’s a logical piece in our brains that tells us, ‘Yeah, this is scary, but really? You’re not really scared are you?’ But there are moments when you go, ‘I’m not going in that closet, it’s too dark.’”

This seems like slightly wimpy talk coming from a guy who claims to have taken actress Linda Blair, the pea soup-spewing actress in “The Exorcist,” to actually see that film in the theater when it was released in 1973.

“We stood in line and when we sat down, the guy in front of us was talking,” Cooper says. “There’s always that guy that talks, so I tapped him on the shoulder and he turns around and he sees me, and you know, that was enough to scare him, but then there’s Linda Blair, and she goes ‘Shut up’ in this really dark voice. I think that guy will never end up talking about that forever.”

Kelli Skye Fadroski lives for entertainment. She’s worked at The Orange County Register since 2006 and has covered all things music, stand-up comedy, horror and more. When she’s not out reviewing a concert or interviewing some random famous person, she’s catching up on episodes of “The Walking Dead,” somewhere sampling craft beer, enjoying Taco Tuesday or yelling at the contestants through the TV on “Celebrity Name Game” for not knowing basic pop culture trivia. She’s also a diehard Detroit Lions fan.

Join the Conversation

We invite you to use our commenting platform to engage in insightful conversations about issues in our community. Although we do not pre-screen comments, we reserve the right at all times to remove any information or materials that are unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable to us, and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy the law, regulation, or government request. We might permanently block any user who abuses these conditions.

If you see comments that you find offensive, please use the “Flag as Inappropriate” feature by hovering over the right side of the post, and pulling down on the arrow that appears. Or, contact our editors by emailing moderator@scng.com.